How To Get My Lost Blogs?
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009If someone’s personal blog disappears and is somehow lost, it may not seem like a tragedy. But historically speaking, it well might be. Data management professionals are well aware that as technologies evolve through four generations, data that was created with the methods of the first generation pretty much becomes unreadable. What does this say about the future of digital records such as blogs or even photos hosted on websites?
The situation with digital data parallels earlier changes in music technology. Think of the progression from cylinders to flat vinyl albums to cassette and 8-track tapes to CDs, not to mention mp3s. Who can play those music cylinders now? Similarly, a person’s digital diary on a 5 ¼” floppy disk would now be almost unreadable, as technology has progressed through 3 1/2″ disks to CD-ROM to flash drives. All that music and all that data is simple gone. If a person writes data about their whole life on blog entries, and the hosting company goes out of business, then where are that person’s thoughts and reflections?
Historians can still study cuneiform tablets and reconstruct the history of Babylon, or read Egyptian tomb records and learn what happened in that country 4000 years ago. And because of personally written journals and accounts, America’s founding history is well known. But today’s history may be lost as technology changes. Alter the blogging software of a few sites just enough over the next 20 years, and the news, analysis and personal reflections of millions of people will be gone. A blog may correspond to the papers of older historical figures, but the technology makes it less easy to preserve.
On a smaller scale, blogs themselves are constantly vanishing, as people move them to new servers, start new ones, or simply stop updating altogether. Members of a blogging community, having no other way of knowing the person, lose touch and may never discover what happened to their friend. The blog posts sit there until the host site archives them or deletes them for inactivity, and the person is gone from online history.
As record-keeping continues switch to digital formats and away from paper that might still have been readable a century or two from now, the question of lost records grows in importance. The expense alone of continually upgrading records to new, technological formats is very high, so as people rush headlong into those technologies, they simply resign themselves to losing older data. With the disappearance of the weblogs of ordinary people, as well as those making history, and even people’s simple deletion of their own email, data is vanishing that might leave huge gaps in the future understanding of current world events.
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